The September Issue

I subscribe to Cahiers du Cinéma, which was a subject of discussion here last week, prompted by a post at n+1 by Henry K. Miller, with whom I agree: the magazine remains true to its heritage. The September issue turned up in my mailbox yesterday; it may be the only major film magazine in which Darejan Omirbaev’s splendid “Chouga” gets ten times the space allotted to a review of “I Am Love.” In other words, Cahiers takes notice of the business of cinema but doesn’t let it take precedence over the art.

Yet an uninhibitedly aesthetic appreciation of a movie isn’t necessarily immune to utter absurdity, as is the case with a review, by Isabelle Zribi, of Xavier Beauvois’s film “Of Gods and Men,” which opened in France earlier this month, will be at the New York Film Festival Saturday and Monday, and is also France’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2011 Academy Awards. The movie (which I haven’t seen) tells the real-life story of eight French monks at a monastery in the Algerian town of Tibhirine, in 1996, during a time of civil war, who are threatened by Islamists (and seven of whom are, in fact, killed). Zribi writes:

The film goes beyond its anti-terrorist discourse, and that’s the source of its power. What’s more, it rests on a paradox: it presents, on the surface, a critique of terrorist acts, all the while setting forth a portrait of kamikaze monks. Because, as the action progresses, the characters acquire the certainty of the death that awaits them if they remain in Algeria.

She refers to “the monks’ considered but suicidal decision,” to their “collective decision in favor of a considered yet senseless death and a vain sacrifice,” and adds, “The martyrdom of these monks—martyrdom consisting, in principle, of letting oneself be killed to bear witness to faith—is all the more striking inasmuch as the film is not mystical.” She continues:

Not only are Christians and Muslims kamikazes, but they venerate the same masters of martyrdom. It is in fact Christ—called the prophet Al Masih in the Koran—who sacrificed himself to save the human race, according to the New Testament, who makes the conjunction between Islam and Christianity in “Of Gods and Men.”

I don’t know why an editor didn’t ask Zribi how many people Christ or the monks killed, or tried to kill, as they died—since the attempt to use the body as a weapon, not the fact of willed death, is the distinguishing feature of the kamikaze. I know well that suicide attacks are not at all distinctive of or unique to Islam, that the word “kamikaze” is of course Japanese, that the tactic has been used by other ethnic and religious groups—and even (as I learned from Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, “Film Socialisme”) by German pilots during the Second World War. It’s important, while avoiding judgments on the basis of ethnicity, to point out Zribi’s failure to distinguish those who are ready to die for their faith (e.g., Jesus, the monks) from those who intend to kill others by means of their own death (e.g., kamikazes, suicide bombers). The distinction is of great moral moment. And I wonder whether other readers of the magazine were struck by the obliviousness of Zribi’s remarks.

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